Month: March 2017

Saturday was a painting and refurb day for Dave and I as someone (me – Pete H) forgot the LCP frame repair kit – a collection of tools and pop rivets that I’d taken home the week before.

Dave cleaned and prime the LCP roof joining sections in readiness for repainting. He then spent a happy few hours completing the de rusting, cleaning and priming all the plates used to secure the canvas cover for the two LCP’s roof joins, there are only fifty eight of them! Unfortunately the original canvas roof join covers were completely rotten but have been
salvaged to use as templates for new covers.

The refurb of the LCP door vents is almost complete, they were in desperate need of a refurbishment.

A replacement louvre for one of the vents was cleaned and primed. The replacement louvre recovered from a derelict LCP cabin as the operating arm on the original louvre was broken.

Here is work in progress and the refurbished item:

The fly mesh is beyond a refurb as seen above! In cleaning the door vent louvre we uncovered the makers name ‘Greenwood’ and a quick web search found that the company still exists (I assume it’s the same company) see product as this has a louvre very similar to the LCP door vent.

The twelve awning support frames for the LCP cabin roof are now primed and ready for a top coat.

These are just the frames on the top of the cabin roof, the eight side frames have already been refurbished and primed.

The Mitsubishi video monitor that failed is still in repair. Luckily we do have the circuit diagram but no spare parts. The fault is probably in the power supply but a Line Output Transformer (LOPT) would have been ideal to swap out but not yet found!

A milestone was reached yesterday – the last of the LCP cabin canvas awning frames was stripped of paint. The original LCP paintwork was in such poor condition everything is being taken back to bare metal.

There are now only a few small items left to restore, paint strip and prepare for priming, and all the LCP cabin fittings will be ready for re assembling.
Repairing one of the damaged sections to the frame of the LCP cabin has commenced, there are two, and we are pleased with the results. See accompanying photo.

Back at the workshop more work on the PeriBus simulator has been carried out, using an Arduino to set the logic levels for addressing and data on the PeriBus. A set of CHARGE cards has been brought back from the LCP for testing the failed monitor in the workshop. A case of confirming if the flyback transformer is responsible for the failure, hope not.

The 84 brackets for the LCP’s roof canvas support frames have been refurbished and primed ready for a top coat. Work continues an refurbishing the canvas support frames which starts with removing all the old paint, a very time consuming task.

Work started on repairing a damaged (very bent) section of the LCP’s cabin frame. A certain amount of straightening has been carried out but a short section of the ‘U’ channel frame has been folded in on itself. These sections, there are two of them, are being cut out so a repair can be fabricated.

The simulator was run up but a failure occurred with one of the four large Mitsubishi video monitors, accompanied by a smell of burning. The monitor has been removed for fault finding and hopefully repair. This is the third monitor failure in the past nine months, the two previous unserviceable monitors were successfully repaired.

Pete M spent some time making videos of jamming scenarios on the simulator. Making videos creates a permanent record of the Bloodhound simulator running and also provides for clips to be put in the public domain. Follow us to make sure you do not miss these videos being added to our YouTube channel.

Neil and Pete H. carried out an assessment of the most damaged (bent) part on the LCP’s cabin frame. While the simply bent ‘U’ channelling of the frame can be pulled straight there are two sections where the ‘U’ channel has been folded in on itself. After some consideration Neil and I came to the conclusion that the folded over sections of the frame will need replacing. So, by next week we will source aluminium strip and angle to fabricate these two sections of damaged frame. A start on repairing the ‘U’ channelling will be made next Saturday.

The simulator was run up and it remains fully serviceable. We also tested two suspect WEETABIX cards and the PeriBus Termination card, the latter being serviceable but the WEETABIX cards were unserviceable. The cards were removed from the Argus 700 I/O system some time ago as being in an unknown or ‘U/S’ condition so this was a double check. The WEETBIX cards will now be checked out in Pete’s workshop (AKA spare bedroom) and hopefully repaired. One WEETABIX has one of the two channels U/S and the second appears to have a permanent BUSY set on the PeriBus.

The day was mainly taken up by priming the numerous brackets for the rails for the canvas awning (must be 100 of them) and stripping paint from the rails themselves. Not a favourite occupation but it has to be done.